War God for Hire- Gladiator by David Burke (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

fourteen-hour days of intense physical workouts, Kyle was also busy learning as much as he could about the world he was in. He had mastered or remembered enough of the common language to speak it well after the first thirty days of tutoring. For the last four Verden weeks, he had been playing dumb so as to keep Nyda coming to his cell every night for language classes.

If she caught on to what he was doing, she didn’t seem to mind. Her initial fear and hesitancy around him had long since faded, and he even got her to talk about her past from time to time. It seemed very painful for her, so he didn’t push. He learned enough to know that she had been captured in a raid and some people close to her had died.

As for her life as a slave at the coliseum, she had only arrived a couple days before Kyle. The way she talked, most of her days consisted of cooking and cleaning, besides her tutoring him. There was clearly something that she was dreading, but anytime he tried to broach the subject she would nearly burst into tears, so he dropped it.

He really did enjoy her company, and he could say with some degree of surprise that she was the first woman since his mother who had ever sat next to him on a bed while he wasn’t trying to get into her pants. It wasn’t that he didn’t find her attractive. Quite the contrary.

She was gorgeous. Her hair was so unique, at least to him. He supposed there might be droves of elves with similar light magenta-shaded hair, but that didn’t make her any less gorgeous to him. The almond-shaped eyes, smooth skin, and the perfect hints of curves in all the right places could have driven him to distraction if he wasn’t so focused on his training.

Still, she was a nice diversion. It was just that, this time, he found diversion in simple conversation rather than the horizontal mambo. She talked about simple things; about her life before being captured. The way her village was at the foot of a mountain, collecting water from the stream. Most of it was mundane, but she made it all sound interesting. Just the sound of her voice was worth listening to.

Even her tales of the years after the cataclysm were interesting. A great pit at the foot of the mountain had opened up. She told him numerous tales of the different types of monsters which were released upon the land, and the ways her village could have been terrorized.

Instead, the tear in the earth had exposed a massive nest of creatures known as gembores. They were creatures with cone shaped heads and four powerful limbs they used to tunnel narrow passages into the earth. As they consumed various minerals and rocks, their bodies formed scales made of precious gems. It wasn’t clear from her stories if this was some form of magic or a completely chemical process.

Chapter 14 - Harsh Realities

The weapons training had actually become quite enjoyable for Kyle. It put him back in the mindset of spring training. The physical work occupied his mind, and he learned a great deal about controlling his body. The trainers were surprised at how well he picked up each weapon they presented to him.

As important as those weapons were, Kyle knew that it was not the bat, glove, or ball that played the game. It was the man. His body and his mastery of it were more important. To put it in the terms of his new life in Verden, he was the weapon, and the hammer, spear, or sword were simply extensions of his will.

Kyle was more than a little excited about the increased control of his body. He mastered the ability to move at a speed that would have been beyond anything he could have done on Earth. His strength only increased by one from the weeks of intense training, but Hilde assured him that was because while this workload might be challenging for a mortal, it was nothing to a god.

In contrast, his agility went all the way up to nine and was nearing the peak of normal human or elven limits. He still wasn’t as quick as Kierra or even Gilthan, but he was close to the elf and had blown past the human fighters they were training with.

Saber talked a great deal about the changes he displayed with his stats and had insisted on testing him every week, just to see if Selma’s spell would show any change in them. Rarely was he disappointed. Kyle had been pleased with the progress but knew there was still so far to go.

Name: Krig (Kyle Hudson)

Race: Demi-god (War God/human)

Stats: (Current/Max)

Strength: 17/42

Agility: 9/42

Constitution: 15/45

Will: 12/45

Mind: 7/39

Charisma: 4/29

Essence: (Current/Max)

War: 12/50 – Conversion rate: 1/second

Raw Essence: 3,764

Divine Ability:

Rage Burst, 1 - 4 War

In talking about it, the head trainer always seemed to marvel at his growth and credited it with him being an elemental. Kyle had long since learned what an elemental was from Hilde. It had led to a conversation which was far too esoteric for his taste. Essentially, if he understood it, an elemental was a manifestation of the concept of one of the eight essence types.

She had explained that air elementals occasionally formed when different systems of warm and cold air would clash. The same with earth elementals and earthquakes. Along with sea elementals, those were the most common types. Others like, deceit and lust elementals, were only theorized.

Undead monsters were thought to be a form of death elementals, but Kyle got lost when he was trying to follow Hilde’s explanation of how that worked. The one he was most interested in, of course, was war elementals. From what his angelic guide explained, they were born in the aftermath of massive battles when nations fought nations.

Hilde didn’t seem to know for sure how elementals manifested, or at least her explanations seemed